


Dancing Shadows

by ncfan



Series: Femslash Big Bang [13]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: If | Fire Emblem: Fates
Genre: F/F, Femslash Big Bang, Femslash Big Bang Monthly Challenge, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 08:46:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18206210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: Corrin had had little experience of what it was like to sleep out in the elements. She had been raised in a mountain fastness she was wondering lately if she shouldn’t think of as a cage, and had never, ever been permitted to leave. So adjusting to sleeping outside was not the easiest thing in the world for her. Then again, there was a lot of adjusting she needed to do.





	Dancing Shadows

Corrin had had little experience of what it was like to sleep out in the elements. She had been raised in a mountain fastness she was wondering lately if she shouldn’t think of as a cage, and had never, ever been permitted to leave. Gunter and Xander had both wanted her to have at least the basics of surviving in the wilderness down pat, but in the end, all of her training had had to come from books, for Father (or King Garon; trying to decide what to call him now made her head hurt) would not allow her to leave the Northern Fortress.

Equestrianism had been Corrin’s favorite part of this particular branch of learning. The paddock and tiltyards of the Northern Fortress were large enough that Corrin could train properly in how to ride a horse—though, as Gunter had always cautioned, there was a difference between riding a horse in such controlled circumstances and riding a horse out in the wide world. She loved handling the horses, and it allowed her to spend time with Lilith, whose duties rarely allowed her to leave the stables before dark for anything but a quick meal in the kitchens. It was soothing, being around horses, learning how to ride them and groom them and look after their health; Corrin could feel a knot in her shoulders loosen when she ran a brush through a horse’s fur.

It would have been useful if she had had a horse nearby her, now. It would have been comforting to have a horse nearby. Though Gunter had survived his fall down the Bottomless Canyon, his destrier, Falchion, had not, and Corrin wanted a horse nearby her less than she felt horrible for him. She did not voice her desires aloud.

The fire had not burned down, despite no fresh fuel being added to it since it had been lit. Lilith might have had something to do with that. Corrin had made a sharp, high noise of alarm, heart hammering off-beat, when Lilith crawled straight into the fire several hours before, but the little dragon (dragon! Corrin was still trying to make that fit properly in her head) was completely unharmed by the flames. Her scales flashed and glimmered like polished glass, like pearl and sapphire and ruby, and she rolled over on her back, almost purring in contentment like a cat. The whole sight was unreal, and when the morning came, Corrin was going to ask Lilith if she was some kind of salamander, on top of being a dragon. It would certainly have been interesting to find out.

She wasn’t supposed to look directly into the fire. Gunter had had the watch shift immediately before hers, and he had taken care to remind her of that before he lied down to sleep. Don’t look directly into the fire, Corrin; doing so will destroy your night vision, and leave us vulnerable to ambush. She knew; she remembered. It was her fault that her small party of companions had so much arrayed against them. She wouldn’t be responsible for them being ambushed in the dark of night.

Corrin sighed, rolling her stiff shoulders wearily and wishing for what felt like the hundredth time since she had fled the battlefield to have her bed to sleep in. Wishing she had something to lean against, rest her head against, that wasn’t the rough, unyielding trunk of the pine tree at her back. Getting shocked into wakefulness by Flora or Felicia was miles more pleasant than sleeping on the cold, hard earth, even if she found wakefulness by someone shaking her awake instead.

She’d learned something new: Jakob snored. Corrin would have liked to have learned that somewhere she had an actual bed.

The fire popped loudly, and Corrin flinched, eyes darting around the forest choked with darkness, heart juddering before she finally forced herself to calm.

Beside her, Azura stirred.

“Azura?” Corrin whispered, as her friend’s golden eyes flickered slowly open. “Azura, it’s not time for your watch, yet. Go back to sleep.”

“I don’t think I could go back to sleep.” Azura’s voice, though soft, carried no hint of the fug of sleep. She sat up with an easy grace Corrin both envied intensely and loved to watch, shrugging off the cap Corrin had stripped from her own shoulders to serve as a blanket and handing it back to its owner. “My dreams trouble me. Besides—“ the eyes she turned on Corrin were transformed to molten gold by the firelight “—it will be time for my own watch soon, will it not? I’ll sit up with you, until then.”

Corrin scooted over a little, the better to let Azura have a spot next to her leaning against the sturdy pine trunk. “I know that feeling,” Corrin said with a sigh. “About the dreams, I mean. My dreams are always so vivid. Even when they’re not nightmares, they still just sort of stick with me once I’ve woken up. They’re hard to get out of my head.”

“Hmm.” Azura pressed her hands flat against her lap, the gesture a mirror of the way Queen Mikoto (or Mother, though the title of ‘Mother’ sat uneasily in Corrin’s mind, like a stone balanced on a sheet of marzipan) had positioned her hands when she sat. One of her hands promptly shot up to fiddle with her pendant. “Some of my dreams are like that.”

A tilt of the head, an impatient hand pushing thick, disheveled black curls out of her eyes, and Corrin was peering intently into Azura’s face. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked softly.

“No.”

Her tone was like the edge of a sword, and Corrin flinched and looked away. “Sorry,” she muttered. She buried her hand in her hair, winding a thick lock around her fingers.

A hand with cool, soft fingertips lit on her own. Azura was smiling at her, if faintly. “Maybe later, though. I just don’t wish to speak of it now.” She stared blackly into the night-dark forest. “It does not do to speak of such things when night holds sway.”

“I suppose not.”

The only sounds for the next few minutes were the occasional pop and crackle of the fire, and the sound of some sort of bird screeching in the night. An owl, maybe? If Corrin remembered correctly from her studies, owls hunted at night. There were supposed to be many different species of owls, but Corrin couldn’t bring any names to mind at present. It was funny; despite all the books describing the cries of owls as the discordant shrieks she was hearing now, she’d imagined something softer.

Nothing about the world was turning out quite as she had expected.

Corrin found herself staring down at her and her companion’s feet, still twisting a lock of hair in her fingers as her mind wandered.

For as long as she could remember, Corrin had hated wearing shoes. Nowadays, of course, Corrin wondered sometimes if it was shoes in general that she hated, or if the little girl that she could no longer remember being had once worn shoes without complaint, but once confronted with Nohrian shoes that pinched and bit, preferred to eschew them altogether. Corrin yanked the lock of hair held in her grasp. It would have been nice to have known the truth of it.

That she refused to wear shoes had hardly passed without remark by those around her. The first winter that Corrin could properly remember, Gunter had attempted to force a pair of boots onto her feet. The leather had been soft and supple, and any other child would have been grateful for them in the drafty cold of the Northern Fortress. But in less than twelve hours, Corrin had a blister the size of a silver crown on her left heel, and she had hidden the shoes somewhere Gunter had never managed to find them.

The first winter Felicia and Flora were living in the Northern Fortress, Flora warned Corrin of the dangers of exposure and frostbite, only for Gunter to shake his head wearily. Corrin felt the cold, certainly, but she had gone barefoot in the snow and never suffered ill effects. _“The blood of the dragon, girl. They are not like other men.”_ (If only he had known. She still couldn’t find a way to tell him.) They always watched for the first signs of frostbite, and Corrin’s feet never obliged.

Camilla begged her to wear shoes during combat training. Leo remarked on her having the devil’s own luck, for a sparring partner to have never accidentally stabbed her foot or chopped off one of her toes. Xander took care to avoid her feet when they sparred with anything that had a sharp edge, but when they sparred with tools that could do no worse than leave nasty bruises, there were some days when he struck at her feet almost constantly. “ _It’s a weak point, Corrin, one your enemies won’t hesitate to exploit_.”

No one would ever persuade Corrin to regard her bare feet as a weak point or as any kind of vulnerability. Going through her life perpetually barefoot had left the soles callused, tough as horsehide with a network of silver scars shot through the thick skin. Corrin rarely felt it when she stepped on a stone. She felt it much more keenly when she could not have the earth under her feet, and was instead forced into the confinement of shoe leather.

Corrin had never expected to find someone who shared her animus, but she was looking down now, and seeing that Azura’s feet were just as bare as her own, remembering that Azura had not been wearing shoes when they met or when they walked about the capital together, or at any other time. She could see silver scars and tough calluses to match her own.

Was this just something that happened to a princess who was kidnapped and taken hostage by an enemy kingdom? Was it inevitable that she would discard her shoes and go about as if a vagabond? Or was Corrin’s sleep-deprived mind, inexperienced with the world around it, just carrying her to strange islands of thought?

“Corrin?” A slender, gentle hand lit on her shoulder. “Are you alright?”

“I’m sorry,” Corrin mumbled.

“What?” That hand went to brush Corrin’s hair from her face. The look Azura wore was one of stark confusion. “Whatever for?”

Corrin waved her hand (she wasn’t bothering with her hair, anymore; it wasn’t helping at all) choppily in the air. “I… I ran from the battlefield. I didn’t want to hurt any of my siblings; I didn’t want to hurt _anyone_.” She sucked in a thick, gasping breath. “I wasn’t thinking about what any of them would make of my decision; I wasn’t thinking about anything at all, I was so panicked. I wasn’t thinking about how it would affect you when you followed me. I’ve put you all in horrible danger.” She couldn’t meet Azura’s gaze. “I’m sorry.”

There was a long pause, one as sharp as the edge of Corrin’s new (blessed, supposedly, but the weight of destiny didn’t feel like any blessing) sword. “Corrin.” Azura’s voice, though still soft, was harder now, firmer. “I chose to follow you. Lilith chose to follow you, as did Jakob and Sir Gunter.”

“ _Why_?” Her tone was childish to her own ears, almost petulant. It made Corrin feel like she was a child again, demanding _‘why?!’_ at the imposition of a new rule that would make perfect sense in a matter of months and make her feel like a brat throwing a tantrum. It came out regardless of her own bitter thoughts.

“You do recall what I told you of my mother, do you not?” Azura asked, very softly.

Corrin nodded mutely.

“My mother is gone.” A horrible, glaring blankness froze Azura’s face, leaving her as lovely and as lifeless as a statue carved from alabaster. “Gone, I said; death does not describe properly what became of her, and I have not the words for what it was that happened. And my father is dead, along with all his people. Vengeance holds no appeal for me; I do not hear its song. But I am interested in justice. Ending the bloodshed between Hoshido and Nohr, ending what births that bloodshed, that is justice to me.” Something flashed in her eyes, an emotion that Corrin couldn’t identify, but fire her eyes more intensely than Corrin had seen before in the short time that they had known each other. “If I must heap scorn upon myself by forsaking both Nohr and Hoshido, then I do so gladly, for the sake of peace.”

That...

Corrin had been raised like a hothouse rose (The alternative way of thinking of it was ‘gilded cage,’ but the edges of that idea cut her mind when she tried to think about it, and so she shied away). Every aspect of her upbringing under the nominal care of King Garon had been strictly controlled. Her training had been stringent, the things that must have been done to her mind to make her forget her early childhood in Hoshido even more so (she knew it wasn’t natural, knew she was too old to have lost those memories naturally, wondered sickly how much Xander and Camilla knew about it), but otherwise, she had been very sheltered. She had been doted on by her foster siblings, had always had children nearby who were nominally her servants, but were in practice her companions and playmates.

She had known nothing of the true harshness of life for as long as she had been immured in the Northern Fortress. Nothing, she insisted, thinking on her hothouse life, and trying not to think of the way she had often fretted about why she wasn’t permitted to go at liberty as her brothers and sisters were. Nothing, she insisted, shying uneasily away from the knots she had twisted herself into to avoid courting displeasure. Hadn’t she twisted herself into a knot back on the battlefield? Hadn’t it backfired spectacularly?

She couldn’t imagine staring at the twice-destroyed ruins of her own life, and having her eyes fired with something beyond description. She wished she had that conviction.

_I’ll just have to find it inside of myself, won’t I?_

“What about your family in Hoshido?” A cold breeze cut through the small clearing; Corrin shivered, drawing her unattached cape about her shoulders like the blanket Azura had been using it as earlier. “Our path may bring you into conflict with them.”

Azura shrugged. “Are they my family?” Before Corrin could even do something with the horror sprouting in her chest, Azura went on musingly, “Well… Queen Mikoto raised me as her own child, over the objections of those who wished for me to be nothing more than a prisoner.” That slender hand went up to fidget with her pendant again. “She was kinder to me than was required,” Azura said quietly, “and that, I do not forget. When I was a ward of Queen Mikoto’s, of her children, I spent the most time with Sakura. She regarded me as her sister, though she knew the truth; she has never known a time when I wasn’t in her life. As for the others—“ Azura shifted her weight uneasily “—Ryoma and Hinoka call me ‘Sister,’ and they have never been anything but polite. They have duties of their own; they don’t have much time to spend with me. Takumi never accepted me as his sister—“

Corrin’s mouth twisted in something between a grimace and a scowl. “I noticed.”

But Azura’s tone was gentle as she retorted, “Do you think that a boy who has watched his mother die before him ever behaves just as he does when not under such strain?”

“I know, I know. He just…” Corrin clicked her tongue. Her stomach was churning. “I don’t like the way he talked to you. I could understand it when it was me, since…” There was a splinter of an image in her head, a splinter of a scream in her mind, a splinter of inhuman emotion that threatened to catch fire and devour and turn her into a beast. “I could understand when it was me. But you’ve lived in Hoshido for years and years, and he’s young enough that he probably can’t even remember a time when you weren’t there all that clearly. All that, and he still treats you like you’re an outsider.”

“That’s because I _am_ an outsider,” Azura pointed out. “I told you. Queen Mikoto and Sakura both regarded me as family. Ryoma and Hinoka were diplomatic; they were never unkind. And certain of Queen Mikoto’s and her children’s retainers regarded me kindly. But I have not been accepted as a princess of Hoshido by the bulk of the royal court.” Firelight flickered over her face. “No one ever said as much to me, but I know many of them regarded me as nothing more than a high-ranking hostage.”

“I was never presented to the royal court.” And in retrospect, that really should have been a clue. “Even after I was deemed fit to leave the Northern Fortress, I was only presented to…” She tried to make her mouth form ‘King Garon.’ She tries to force the words through her lips. “…To Father. I can’t imagine what the court must think of me.” Corrin drew her knees to her chest. “Do you…” Lilith shifted in her sleep, throwing dancing sparks of white and crimson and sapphire light across the clearing. “…Do you miss Nohr?”

Corrin did, and the intensity with which she missed it frightened her. A bleak, desolate place Nohr might be, the place she was held hostage by a king ready to kill her at the first sign of disloyalty it might be, and yet…

“No.” Azura’s voice was like the shutting of the door of a crypt. “There was little joy to be found in my life in Nohr. I do not miss it.”

“Oh.”

Corrin was starting to wonder if there wasn’t something wrong with her, after all. On top of everything else, that was.

“We will save it.” Azura’s voice was firm, but her touch was gentle as her hand slid over Corrin’s. “You know that, don’t you? Ending this war will give Nohr a chance to flourish as it hasn’t been allowed to for a long time.”

Corrin thought of the barren fields she had ridden past on her way to Windmire, and wondered if it would really be that easy, after all. “I want to see more of it.” Corrin raked her teeth over her lower lip. “Is that strange? Elise has always told me so many stories about all the places she’s seen in Nohr, and I always wanted to see them, but Nohr isn’t really my home, after all, and neither is Hoshido, not really, not if I can’t _remember_ anything about it, and…” She stopped herself, frowning. “I’m rambling. I’m sorry.”

“You keep saying that.”

“What, ‘I’m rambling?’”

Azura’s mouth twitched. “No, you goose; ‘I’m sorry.’ Not everything is your fault, Corrin.”

“I know. It’s… Sorry.” Corrin realized what she had just said and rolled her eyes. “It’s force of habit; I couldn’t stop if I tried. There’s…” She sighed, the terror and the strain of the last several days descending on her all at once like a yoke made of lead. “There’s so much arrayed against us, and I… I don’t want to be hated. By anyone. I don’t really want to hurt anyone, either, but I can’t seem to make any decision that doesn’t end with me hurting anyone, or without someone coming to hate me.”

Though Azura’s tone was steady, her eyes darted uneasily as she replied, “That’s what war is, Corrin. That’s what _life_ is. You cannot go throughout life without hurting people; it will happen, whether or not you intended it, whether or not you are even aware of having done it. War is like that, writ large.” Her darting eyes grew flat. “Even when fought with the noblest of intentions.”

Corrin nodded, trying to keep the gesture from being too obviously jittery. “You know, I had to read what felt like a hundred books about military history and strategy when I was being tutored. Leo would quiz me about it from time to time, always when I wasn’t expecting it. It was so annoying when we were children, but nowadays, I’m grateful; it’s the only reason I can actually remember most of it. They talked about ways to limit casualties, but it was never… It was always so remote,” she said lamely. “It never really captured what it would _feel_ like.”

Azura sighed, her face flickering in an expression that was almost a grimace. “No, I suppose it wouldn’t.” She pressed her hands flat against her lap again. “I suspect war would be much less appealing to most,” she said, very quietly, “if those eager to fight were made to understand just what it would do to the world. And those who live in it.”

She looked so tired, all of a sudden, and Corrin couldn’t help but give her shoulder a gentle squeeze. “This isn’t easy for you, either, is it?”

This got Corrin an ambivalent shrug, flesh rolling under her hand until she could feel unyielding bone. “I must find a way to end this war. My own feelings are unimportant by comparison.” But after a moment, Azura bowed her head, ever so slightly. “It’s…” The word came out as a mumble, audible to Corrin only thanks to her proximity.

“I’ll support you, you know.” Another squeeze to Azura’s shoulder, and this time, Corrin felt it quiver a little under her touch. “Whatever help you need, I’ll be there. Please.”

They were… Their experiences were not the same, not exactly. Not the same, not really. But Corrin knew no one else who had as much of a claim to share her exact experiences as did Azura. And she thought that maybe, just maybe, Azura might think the same of her. Two girls, taken far from home, always with a wrongness to their situations, even when there were people who loved them who were with them always. Corrin… She wanted that kind of companionship. Now that she had found it, she didn’t want to give it up.

The smile Azura turned on Corrin was one that Corrin couldn’t quite make sense of. All she could say of it was that if was fond, and tired. “Shouldn’t I be saying that to you?” She lifted Corrin’s hand off of her shoulder and held it in her own, the moment of contact lingering for several moments in Corrin’s mind, and the warmth of her hand sinking through Corrin’s glove and staying there for several moments more. The warmth made Corrin’s skin tingle. “Now, get some sleep. It’s time for my watch, and you need rest.” The smile faded from her face. “We will reach Fort Jinya tomorrow, and it is not likely to be a pleasant meeting that we have there.”

Corrin nodded, her face screwing up a grimace. “I know. Because we haven’t sided with Hoshido, so we aren’t an ally, and we haven’t sided with Nohr, so we won’t be recognized as emissaries of another kingdom.” She drummed her fingers on her knee. “As far as they’ll be concerned, we’re nothing but outlaws, for we have no allegiance to any kingdom.”

“Such is our lives now.” Though Azura’s tone was far from that of eagerness. “And you’ll need to be well-rested to confront it properly. So please, sleep.”

As Corrin was drifting off, she felt fingers carding through her hair. The rhythm of the hand they belonged to was as gentle and steady as the lapping of a lake on its shore, and the feeling quickly carried Corrin to sleep.


End file.
